Everyone loves the salsa you serve with your chips and the mole poblano that covers your chicken enchiladas. Your customers, friends, and family members might even have told you to bottle and sell the sauces that come from your restaurant kitchen. Many restaurants have done just that, some with tremendous success.
But it isn’t as simple as it sounds. Just ask Lulu Duran of Cesar’s Killer Margaritas in Chicago. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, she and her siblings Israel and Sandy Sanchez decided to bottle and sell the mole that had become such a popular menu item at their family-run restaurant. It is the mole the family’s matriarch, Lourdes Sanchez (affectionately known as “Senora Lulu”) learned to make as a young girl in her grandmother Clarita Vazquez’s Mexico City kitchen.
We reached out to Duran to find out about the challenges of bottling and selling a restaurant sauce.